<Begin Segment 44>

AI: You know, speaking of that -- because there are some Sansei including your own children who have this awareness, and before we go too much farther, I did want to go back and ask you a little bit about your children's awareness, and when did you start speaking to them about what happened during World War II?

MY: Well, my children accuse me, especially Jeni, you know, Jeni was about... what was that, twelve or so when they had the televised thing about -- 1942, so the forty-year anniversary, commemoration of that was something like 1982 or so? When Jeni was twelve, I think. What, she was born in 1950... no, she was younger than that so this had to be the -- maybe it was the twenty-year, 1962. 1942, '52, '62. In 1962, Jeni would have been about eleven or twelve. We saw the newsreel about this twenty year since the evacuation, incarceration of the Japanese Americans. And it was the first time that she had ever heard anything like this. She was watching it without too much connection to herself. Of course, and then my husband said -- and then they showed little snatches of the camps. And then my husband said, "Your mother was in one of those," you know. And then Jeni looked at me and she just said, "How come you never told me?" She started, she was, her eyes were welling up and she said, "How come you never said anything?" Like, I was saying, "Well, it was not as if I was hiding it or anything, it's just that nobody ever asked me, the subject never came up." And that was, I think at that point that we both started thinking about it, about why -- and then, of course, the essay that I wrote for the Last Witnesses was we both got together and discussed that and we said -- and the younger kids, my youngest daughter was two, they were like two, four, six years old, so they were romping around in the living room and they didn't even know what, even if I had explained to them, they wouldn't even understand anything. Probably your seven-year-old child wouldn't understand very much. I think you'd have to be about eight or nine to become aware of these kinds of issues. With teaching human rights issues to, like teaching the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" of Amnesty to small children, which I have done, I've lectured, you have to bring home to them on a very elemental level. You know, "How would you feel if you were accused of something you didn't do, and somebody locked you up for, or somebody punished you for something you didn't do?" Well, they wouldn't like it very much. "Have you ever been accused of doing something you didn't do?" And they all go, "Yeah, yeah, you know, my sister was" -- you know, that kind of thing. So you have to bring it down to that level, and then they understand. And so if you talk about the evacuation, the incarceration, the evacuation of Japanese Americans, it is, they're capable of understanding.

And so I think the education was very important, and I don't think that I did it with my small children, my children. Partly because it's a lot of work. You know, if you start something, you have to end, to continue, to kind of follow up on it. And with my grandchildren, I have bought books for them, and they have children's books now, which are wonderful. And so you read it to them without really making any kind of a point about it, but I think that even about the Hiroshima atom bomb thing, there is a, "something, no Pika," I think, called... no Pika [Ed. note: Narrator is referring to Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki] I think there are some children's books about that, that was kind of gruesome, but the children understand in their own level, they understand that. So if you start very young and not too heavily involved, political, about it... and so I think that Jeni, the one thing that Jeni says, that she had the sense that something was being kept from her. And so that she had, as a child has fears, you know, when something is being hid from you. And the other thing that we both talked about was that, if you keep secrets from children, no matter what it is -- whether you had been molested as a child, these kinds of things, and you keep a secret from your child and you have to lie about it, then one lie -- another lie has to cover up that first lie, and it kind of mounts through the years. And essentially a wedge is put between you and that child because you have to keep hiding something. If you hide it once then you have to be consistent and keep hiding it. And so if you try to explain to them things that happened to them on their own level, then they might not understand it at that moment, but then as time goes on, they would begin to -- oh yeah, Mom, Grandma talked about that, such and such, they would understand that.

So that's, hopefully that's the process. And I'm not an expert in this field by any means, but it's a start, what we're doing right now with the children. And Jeni has complete understanding of it, and she's trying to apply it to her kids, which is wonderful. And then my younger daughter with her, my oldest, my granddaughter, older granddaughter, my youngest daughter's older child is seven now, the same age as your child, and somewhere within the next two or three years we probably should start with her. She already knows about it because she's been to my readings. When I donated my papers to UCI we had a big reception, that was one occasion when all my brothers came together and we gathered together at my house and had a reunion. And I took Hedi, Alanna to the reading and she saw the exhibit, all the pictures of the family and so forth, and so... you know, sometimes she wasn't paying attention because she's not interested. But it's a start, I think, that we need to... so I think that we need to get, start with even white children in the schools, to expose them to the possibilities of what might happen to them. And you know, there was a time when you felt you shouldn't be, press things that, children have fears enough about getting kidnapped or different kinds of things, being afraid of strangers and things of this sort, and you don't want to compound childhood fears on a child about ghosts in the closet and things like that. But there is a way probably of balancing that a little bit, before, without scaring a child to death about something, and turning them into very paranoid, timid children. I think there must be a balance between the two.

<End Segment 44> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.